Betrayal is a new piece of immersive music theatre – a murder mystery experience – set to the unsettling music of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo. Created by the team behind the acclaimed and “unforgettable” The Full Monteverdi, the new show takes the polyphonic music that I Fagiolini excel in performing and fuses unaccompanied singing with contemporary dance in hidden corners of real-life urban locations.
Its world premiere was on 13 May at Village Underground in Shoreditch (read our review), the 8.30pm BST performance on Friday 15 May will be live-streamed here. It runs for approximately one hour, with no interval, and will not be available to view again on demand.
“We’re approaching Gesualdo’s strange and agonising harmonies through the kind of thinking that seems to have plagued his life,” says director John La Bouchardière. “I’ve taken some of his darkest and most extreme madrigals, and punctuated them with motets and the shadowy Tenebrae for Holy Week to form the structure of a contemporary crime drama. The audience will be immersed in the music and action, but this time they’ll be in murky warehouses and car parks, and be able to follow the performers around.”
Music director Robert Hollingworth said: “Gesualdo’s music holds a fascination for us both: polyphony built on shifting harmonic sands, by far and away the most extreme example of a school of composers that depicted poetic images by extreme gestures. More than 400 years after it was written, it still surprises and shocks. And just as norms only partly apply with Gesualdo’s music, I hope that preconceived rules and ideas that an audience may have about madrigals and motets will be rethought.”
- Betrayal is at the Junction, Cambridge from 20-22 May, then at Salisbury arts festival, 3-5 June. The show is commissioned and presented by the Barbican in association with Village Underground, and produced by I Fagiolini and Percius in association with the Barbican, supported by Arts Council England and Alpha CRC.
